


this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

by veausy



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Coming of Age, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Freeform, Gen, Head Injury, Injury Recovery, Major Character Injury, Memory Loss, Personal Growth, aka what if Mike were a real person who had depth?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-07 11:24:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12840147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veausy/pseuds/veausy
Summary: The first thing Mike asks when he wakes up is, “Where am I?” He blinks blearily and lets his eyes swim over the crowd assembled around his bed. Finally, they land and stick on El.The second thing Mike asks when he wakes up is, “Who are you?”





	1. the root of the root

The first thing Mike asks when he wakes up is, “Where am I?”

Karen, who has hysterically hovered near his hospital bed for the previous two nights, bursts into tears and lunges to hug him, while Ted rubs his nose and glances at the doctor.

“You’re at Baptist Emergency Hospital, Mr. Wheeler. What is the last thing you remember?”

There are plastic tubes stretching from various parts of Mike’s body out into beeping machines, and every so often a nurse walks in, writing something down on a clipboard before walking back out. Mike’s hands toy with the tube in his nose, head resting wearily on a pile of pillows so high that they’re keeping him vertical.

Seconds stretch by as everyone waits for Mike to speak, but he just looks confused. Karen’s rubbing his hair, brushing it out of his face and sniffling into a tissue, and it’s the only sound in the otherwise silent room.

Mike blinks blearily and lets his eyes swim over the crowd assembled around his bed. Finally, they land and stick on El.

She smiles and waves timidly as everyone turns to look at her. She can feel their gazes on her skin like a heavy weight. “Hi, Mike,” she breathes.

The second thing Mike asks when he wakes up is, “Who are you?”

—

The surgeons and the rehabilitation specialists insist that memory loss is common after certain kinds of trauma, and that memories should return naturally as time goes on.

Karen’s voice is still high and sharp when she demands, “When? When will he be back to normal? He can’t go to school while he’s recovering, and you’re saying he might have to relearn retroactively?”

“Mrs. Wheeler,” says the bald doctor who was in the room when Mike woke up, “there is no need for worry. His vitals are stellar, and he clearly remembers the majority of what is most concerning for the neurologists. With proper care and patience, he will bounce back in no time.”

El listens half-heartedly as she nurses a cup of water. She’d refused to leave the hospital the first two days, because she couldn’t bear the thought of Mike waking up alone. Now, Hopper keeps shooting her concerned glances and waiting for her to give in to her distress so they can go back to the cabin.

The waiting room has begun to fill up again as the morning stretches on, and various families with various ailments have come and gone as they’ve sat there listening to the doctors explain Mike’s condition to his parents. Holly had cried herself out after seeing her brother in a medically-induced coma for two days, and is now sleeping with her head in El’s lap, breathing through her open mouth and drooling on El’s jeans.

Hopper rubs his brows and sighs deeply, his eyes heavy-lidded and sad.

Karen’s voice rises again, “‘No need for worry?’ My son was hit by a car and now has a broken leg, a broken arm, and a dislocated shoulder, with a traumatic brain injury on top, and there’s ‘ _no need for worry?_ ’”

Ted sets a hand on his wife’s shoulder and opens his mouth, but thinks better of it and simply looks back at the team of doctors sitting across from them. “When will you have more comprehensive information for us? When can we take him home?”

The doctor with salt-and-pepper hair (as Mike would say) glances at the papers in his hand and makes a thoughtful face. El twists the rim of her plastic cup and feels the edge slide under her fingernail, making her jerk in pain and hiss quietly. Hopper’s watching her now, but she studies her finger without another sound.

“It’ll be about another week of tests, so we can gauge the extent of his memory loss and the damage to brain tissue. Ideally, he’ll start some of his physical training before he leaves as well.”

Nancy clears her throat, but her voice still comes out quiet and scared when she asks, “Is he - is he going to need more surgery?”

Bald Doctor shakes his head with a gentle smile, “Fortunately I can give you good news there - Mike is now fully in stable condition and responding well to medication. He will need no other invasive treatment.”

Lucas appears at the end of the hallway holding two cups, and El watches him amble over, his shirt wrinkled just like hers is from lying crumpled and bent in half on the uncomfortable waiting room chairs. He hands one cup to Dustin and one cup to Max, who’s gone home a few times to grab everyone a change of clothes, but nobody seems to have the energy to make use of it.

Having only known Mike for a few weeks, Max hadn’t had any expectations of being remembered by him once they saw he had forgotten El, but she had still looked uncomfortable when he’d expressed no memory of her whatsoever.

Nursing the steaming cup of coffee Lucas had given her, she turns sad eyes on El, who blinks back and feels empty.

—

El joined the boys when they went to see Mike at the hospital two times.

They’d brought him his favorite books - though the doctors told him not to strain his eyes for more than fifteen minutes at a time - and they talked avidly about the campaign he’d planned last time they played D & D, going over every move with enthusiasm that he seemed to want to return.

But he’d look at El sometimes with a blank stare, like he couldn’t understand why she was there, and it made her shrink into her chair awkwardly, unable to meet his eyes. The others would try to involve her, mentioning things they’d all done together in the last few weeks, but there was almost a drop in temperature every time Mike saw her, like something important was severed in him - or maybe in her.

The third time Hopper brings her the phone and says Lucas is asking if she wants to be picked up, she sits on the floor of her room and stares at the leg of her bed, eyes roving over the time-weathered scratches in the cherry wood. “I don’t think I’ll go,” she says finally, something clenching around her heart painfully.

“Aw, El,” Lucas sighs. “You just gotta give him time to warm up. Even if he doesn’t remember you, he’ll start liking you after a while anyway. Or vice versa, you know. I mean, it’s Mike. And you. It’s Mike and you.”

“I don’t think I’ll go,” she repeats, voice quieter. Hopper is tinkering with something in the kitchen, but he’s been giving her a lot of sad looks lately, and she doesn’t want him to hear. 

There’s a commotion on the other end of the line and Dustin’s voice bursts into her ear, “El! Don’t get discouraged! He still adores you, you just gotta remind him.”

El smiles despite herself but doesn't feel it reach her eyes. “Tell him hi.”

Dustin sighs with exaggeration. “Yeah, okay.”

She carefully considers her next words, but ends up saying them before she can change her mind, “Is Max going?”

“Nah, she’s out of town with her mom for some family thing.”

“Okay,” El says, not feeling very appeased at all. She’s realizing she actually likes Max, and she’s realizing she feels very alone.

—

When February starts, there’s a storm that covers the streets in layers of fresh white snow. Mike is still only a couple of days into his physical therapy, but the boys get permission to wheel him out into the courtyard of the hospital so they can have a snowball fight and listen to the silence that comes with snowfall.

El joins them, because Hopper told her to quit moping, and when Max comes along, her mood actually rises. She feels silly for thinking it, but at least she won’t be the only one Mike doesn’t know anymore.

The hospital is teeming with children who’ve injured themselves out in the snow while sledding, and El watches as their parents fuss and coo over them, wondering if her mother would have done the same.

Mike is in a bad mood that day, which the doctors warned them would sometimes happen. Physical injuries tend to have dramatic emotional consequences on the injured, especially when they’re cooped up in sterile rooms without the ability to control their surroundings.

He grumbles when he trips getting into the wheelchair, but then Will makes a quiet joke as he begins to cart Mike out of the room, and by the time they’re in the courtyard, Mike is chuckling.

El watches the snowball fight for a few minutes, trying to understand the objective, and Max abstains from playing to sit with her. 

After a few minutes, El blinks and looks at Max. “Snowball. Like … like the Snow Ball.”

The other girl grins. “Yeah, it’s a pun.”

“Pun?”

Max found El’s habit of asking questions to be difficult at first, but after several instances of El repeating words and the boys rattling off their definitions, she barely seems to think about it before saying, “They’re jokes about words. Like when words have two meanings. Snowball, like a ball of snow. And Snow Ball, like a ballroom dance with a snow theme.”

Dustin’s groan reaches them first from behind a tree, and then he gripes, “Can we please not talk about the Snow Ball?”

Max’s gray hat twinkles in the bright white light as she turns to the tree. There’s no visible sun from behind the falling snowflakes, but the entire sky seems lit up somehow. “Yeah, okay, Mr. I-dance-with-high-school-hotties.”

Mike’s sitting in his wheelchair with his leg propped up, and he starts slightly. “You danced with high schoolers at the Snow Ball?”

Dustin crunches through the snow to drop down on the bench beside Max. “Just your sister, to be specific.”

Mike’s hands jerk to the wheels and he turns himself around, disgust on his face. “You did _what_?”

“I didn’t suck face with her or anything!” Dustin pauses, and then does his purring noise. El grimaces and Max snorts, while Mike just keeps staring at him. “I wasn’t dancing with anyone, and she was trying to be nice.”

Lucas pelts a snowball straight at Dustin’s head, and the two run off to the other end of the yard, their laughter almost growing muted as more falling snow divides them from the benches.

Will walks over and brushes off the snow that’s landed on the picnic table, clapping his hands together to get the water off his gloves. “Nancy danced with me, too.”

Mike rolls his eyes, “Ugh.”

Will laughs. “Hey, I was just there to hang out, she brought Jonathan as her chaperoning partner.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Mike repeats, even louder. A sharp bark of laughter from Lucas in the distance distracts him for a second before he asks, “Did I go to the Snow Ball this year?”

The silence that follows is thundering, and El’s heart beats in her ears.

Max doesn’t speak, choosing to play with the zipper on her coat instead, so finally Will clears his throat. “Yeah, with - with El, actually.”

El doesn’t look up, too afraid of what she might see on Mike’s face. He’d never been great at masking his thoughts, and one of the things that made it so easy for her to trust him had been the easy way with which he broadcast all his emotions on his face. But there are few good emotions anymore - and everything he broadcasts seems to hurt her.

“Oh,” Mike finally says. “Cool.”

—

There are explicit memories and implicit memories, the doctors say.

Explicit memories are ones you can recall, like what you ate for breakfast or whom you saw at the bank. If someone asks you about them, you have an answer.

Implicit memories are ones you use all the time but can't remember storing in your mind, like how to ride a bike or form sentences. If someone asks how you throw a ball, you cannot explain how you learned to do it.

Mike's implicit memories are fully intact, because he uses words he learned after 1983, even if all of his explicit memories of El and the upside down and Will's disappearance are gone. He likes songs he heard during the year El was gone, just as he liked them then, and he doesn't seem to notice how gangly his limbs have become in the year of memory that left him.

With every mention of things he cannot remember, he gets quieter and more uneasy, so Karen bans all speaking about his missing year.

On one hospital visit, El wears a thick wool dress donated to her by Nancy, and Holly coos over it for a while.

Dustin encourages the situation, happy to pay El a compliment when she's been mostly stuck in limbo between supporting Mike's recovery and developing her own life and interests. "You look great, El, you really do."

"So pretty," Holly echoes, stroking a hand down the hem of El's dress, little fingers poking at the shiny threads. 

"Don't you think she looks good, Mike?" Dustin asks, quirking one eyebrow at his reclining friend. A lot of blankets are piled around Mike on the hospital bed that looks small around his significant height, and he's staring morosely at where Holly is caressing El's thigh. "Very pretty?"

Mike clears his throat and nods once, jerkily. "Yeah, pretty. Good."

El instantly catches his eyes, but there is a total lack of recognition there. The same words, spoken over a year later to the same person, but he has no idea at all. Losing him in 1983 was nothing, nothing compared to this.

—

Hopper hasn’t really let El out of his sight since the night she closed the gate.

He’d warned her many times that the danger that came with the lab was never going to fully disappear, no matter how many gates she closed or how many monsters she banished. She stayed in the cabin when he went to work, still, but he drove her out to her friends’ houses sometimes as long as he got to stay and supervise.

Before the accident, Mike had told El about Valentine’s Day, and they’d even made plans to spend time together that day eating chocolate and Eggos.

As the day actually rolls around, Hopper refuses to let her out of the house. It’s a Thursday and it’s unseasonably warm and he drops a bag of chocolate chip Eggos on the kitchen table with a glare, grunting, “You’ll get your chocolate and your Eggos and your damn Valentine’s Day, but I’m not letting you near that kid.”

El blinks, uncomprehending. “Why?”

“I don’t trust him,” he replies, rummaging in the refrigerator and pulling out possible toppings for her Eggos as though it will distract her.

“He doesn’t remember me,” El reminds him.

“Exactly,” he mumbles as he bites into an apple and pulls out a large plate.

“He doesn’t remember about Valentine’s Day,” El continues, still confused.

Hopper chews diligently, staring at the box of waffles as though it has personally offended him, before ripping it open and piling some onto the plate. “That’s right.”

“Why can’t I be near him?”

The toaster creaks pitifully when Hopper pulls the lever down. He stares at the hot wires as they turn orange around the waffles for a moment before rubbing at his beard and turning to her. “He doesn’t know you right now, kid. He doesn’t even know himself. I know I told you to stop moping, but I hate that you keep going over there and always coming back looking crushed.”

El frowns and sits at the table slowly. “Not crushed.”

From the first day she’d been free, Mike had been her tether to the world, and now the tether had snapped. The world was slowly drifting away from her, and she didn’t have any way to pull it back. The boys made sure to include her in things, but they were much busier with school and other activities in which she had no part. Nobody was quite as invested in her involvement and her presence as Mike had once been, and every new day felt long and arduous, distancing her from everything she’d been promised when Mike had kissed her.

The last time she saw him, he’d offered her a few polite smiles, but the warmth was missing. There is no sparkle in his eyes when he looks at her, and there is no more history between them. Despite having had her time at the lab explained to him, he doesn’t understand why she is quiet, why she is afraid, why she is sad.

He doesn’t know that she has powers, and that she saved his life once, and that she needs him. Because existing in the world has, for some time at least, really just meant existing in Mike’s. 

Not crushed. She feels erased.

—

An unseasonably warm Thursday in February stretches into a heat wave that melts almost all of the snow in the streets, leaving wet puddles everywhere and making dirt tracks virtually inescapable.

El joins Hopper in their yard to rake some newly fallen leaves, and when they gather the piles up into bags to leave by the garage, she spots a demolished bicycle on the grass behind some boxes.

“No,” Hopper says curtly, heaving his Hefty bag high into the air. It flies easily and slams into the wall, a loud crinkle following its descent to the ground.

“Because it’s broken?” she asks hopefully, planning to fix it with her powers.

“Because no,” he grunts, sending another garbage bag slamming into the wall. El wonders why he doesn’t just walk them to the wall. She’s come to understand, though, sometimes people just do things that aren’t necessary and there’s no real reason why, like how Hopper and Max both call Mike by his last name even though his first name is shorter.

“But I could use it to ride to the -“

“I said no,” he says sharply, eyeing her. “You won’t be another kid in the hospital, not on my watch. It’s my new rule, right after ‘don’t be stupid.’”

El glares at him. “It was an accident.”

“Yeah, kid, an accident. As in, it happened accidentally. Which means Wheeler didn’t bike into traffic willy-nilly, a car _hit_ him. By accident.”

“I’ll be careful,” El says, voice louder and cheeks hotter. “I’m tired of _here_ every day.”

“No.”

“Not no,” she shouts. “Not no! I haven’t seen friends since before Valentine’s. I can’t see Mike. The TV doesn’t have new things, I’ve seen everything. _Not no._ ”

Hopper’s eyes soften. He rubs one hand over his eyes and sighs. “I know, kid. I’m sorry.” He walks toward her and gently pulls her into his chest, kissing her forehead. “But Hawkins just got you back. We all just got you back. We can’t lose you again.”

The echo of the words Mike had once said to her, words he had really meant, stabs at her chest, and she feels hot tears spill over her cheeks. She hasn’t been to see Mike in over a week. Mike hasn’t talked to her over his Telecom in over a month. She feels, deep in her heart, she may never again hear the voice that used to call out to her for three hundred fifty-three days.

—

“Why do people kiss?”

Max chokes on the chip she’s been chewing and slaps at her chest a few times as she laughs through her own coughs. “Wait, _what_?”

El repeats, “Why do people kiss?”

They’re sitting on the floor in Max’s bedroom, and El has just finished reading a passage that was assigned to Max for homework. It’s a boring read about the hazards of kissing young children on the face, since many of them are still not immune to certain illnesses.

The bag of chips Max is holding crinkles when she sets it down beside her. “I guess it’s like a sign of affection. When you kiss someone, you’re showing that you care about them.”

“You can do it to anyone?”

“Well, there are different types of kisses - but still, no. You probably can’t kiss a teacher or a random stranger, that’s not normal. Even if you care about your teacher or you really like the stranger.”

“Do the kiss spots mean different things?”

“Everything except the lips is probably affection,” Max muses, munching on another chip slowly. Chips, El discovered, are her second favorite food. It feels strange to be discovering new things and becoming someone different without Mike, but, as Hopper told her, life can’t be put on hold no matter how much people want it to be. Life needs to be lived. So she’s eating chips, and having sleepovers with Max, and living. “The lips are almost exclusively romantic.”

“What’s ‘romantic?’”

Max squints at her for a second and then leans over to dig under her bed, pulling out a pile of magazines. There are different faces on all the covers, and the edges look worn. “First of all, you can’t tell anyone I have these. It’ll completely ruin my image.”

El glances down at the magazines and then back at Max. “What?”

“My mom buys me these tween rags, and I do read them, but nobody can know. Promise me.”

Confused, El just nods. “Promise.” 

“Second of all, let’s just get this out of the way right now - did you and Wheeler kiss?”

El pauses. Mike doesn’t know it happened; she is the only one. But if she is the only one, who is to say it’s real? Most of her life before Mike’s accident seems like something she dreamed.

“No.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a whole fluff routine going, until I remembered that I exist in constant angst. This is a tripartite byproduct.
> 
> The plot was inspired by a desire to explore who these kids are when they don't mold their identities around each other. And much as I adore Mike the way the Duffers wrote him, there remain unexplored (perhaps less lovable) facets of his personality that tend not to exist around El. 
> 
> Mileven forever <3


	2. the bud of the bud

The week Mike gets crutches, Jonathan offers to drive them all to The Palace so they can be together in town for the first time in months.

Max invites twin siblings from her gym class, Isabel and Nate, because they told her they can beat all her high scores.

The rest of the party mostly watches the three run around to different games and slap each other’s hands away from the controls as they battle for victory, and Lucas doesn’t even attempt to speak to Max in the midst of the madness. Eventually, Will gets them a table near the snack bar and they watch the battle from afar.

“Is she always this competitive?” Mike asks through a mouthful of nachos. He’s been receptive to Max’s friendship in a way the boys told El he hadn’t been the first time around. 

Lucas shakes his head with a scoff. “She took down everyone’s high scores the week she moved here.”

Will nods, “And we never even saw her in here.”

The plate of nachos sits in the center of the table, free for anyone to grab, but El watches Mike’s fingers reach for it every so often and can’t seem to make her own move. His hair is longer now, a bit disarrayed from being overlooked during his hospital stay, but she can almost imagine that he’s the same boy she had known for over a year.

He seems to feel her gaze on him and looks up, making them both freeze. His hand hovers near his mouth with half a chip in it, and she watches him hesitate. Finally, he quirks his mouth in a half-smile. “You a big fan of the arcade, El?”

She looks down and shakes her head, embarrassed, because she’s never had the chance to even try. Mike was supposed to teach her.

Max appears next to her suddenly, straddling the remaining empty chair. “You gotta come play.”

El’s eyes widen. “I can’t.”

“I’ll friggin’ teach you, don’t be a wuss.”

The others are watching them carefully, but Mike’s the only one who isn’t alarmed by Max’s tone. He doesn’t know how gentle he used to be with El, by contrast.

Something in El resolves. She feels her spine straighten. The Mike she knew is gone, and he may not come back. Her life has to exist outside of that tragedy.

She takes Max’s proffered hand and lets herself be led deeper into the cluster of machines.

—

Isabel and Nate become a staple of their arcade outings after that, frequently driving all of them around town because they’re a year older and get to use the family car.

Nate takes a liking to El, enjoying her quietness and brevity when Isabel and Max are so loud. He leads her around The Palace slowly, helping her understand the different objectives of the games, and doesn’t ask any questions when she doesn’t understand him or looks uncomfortable. Dustin tends to give El knowing looks that she cannot decipher, but he seems to like Nate as much as the rest of them, even going so far as to invite him to his house along with the rest of the party for a movie marathon.

“So I haven’t seen you around Hawkins before. Did you move here after Max?” Nate asks one afternoon over another plate of nachos that they share with Will, who’s sitting quietly and watching everyone in their different distractions around the arcade. 

“Yes,” El says, quickly running through Hopper’s story in her head. He’d forced her to memorize it, but she hasn’t spoken to enough people to need to use it, so she’s on her guard as she recites it to herself. “I live with my uncle.”

“How come?”

“I,” she glances at Will, who shrugs at her but smiles encouragingly, “I lost my mom.” The best lies, Hopper had said, are half-truths.

“Oh, shit,” Nate hisses. “My bad. That must be hard.”

El shrugs noncommittally, munching on a chip. Nate has piercing blue eyes with long eyelashes that seem to cut through her skin and see into her innards, but it doesn’t feel threatening anymore. She wishes for someone to see her the way Mike used to, but it’s a poor replacement.

“You don’t go to Hawkins Middle, though?”

The thud of crutches on the old linoleum floor makes El glance up. Mike lowers himself into a chair beside Will and nods at the group. “Max just destroyed me.”

El looks at her friend, now alone holding the controls of her game, heels of her feet jerking up and down as she nearly athletically maneuvers around the Pac-Man ghosts. Her hair jumps with her, shiny waves of it undulating over her back. Max’s easy friendship with Mike after his accident could make El upset, but she can’t seem to muster the emotions. Max hadn’t done anything but be herself: holding Lucas’s hand when they walk together, loudly arguing about things that happen at school, and speaking frankly to everyone in a way El never could. Mike seems to find that easier to understand than El’s shy silences and frequent social discomfort.

Will giggles. “Don’t take it personally, she’s better than all of us.”

Nate shakes his head. “Will, you’ve got three high scores, and that’s two more than any of the rest of us.”

Will turns red, eyes squinty and happy. It had come as a shock to everyone but Nate, somehow, that Will had some savage hidden talents he never talked about, and El likes that he gets to shine now in a way that might have seemed impossible a few months ago.

Mike grabs a nacho. “El, I saw you dethroned me on Donkey Kong. I’m a little mad about it.”

El looks up, feeling cold, but he has a glint in his eyes that throws her off. He’s teasing her. She smiles back and glances at Nate quickly. “Nate told me a cheat.”

Mike looks at the other boy, his face unreadable. “But Nate doesn’t have a high score at all.”

Nate grins. “I prefer to win fair and square.” He looks at Will, who smiles at him, and El feels warm in this moment. She’s a part of something, finally, and she didn’t need anyone to make room for her. She’s making room for herself.

—

Mike’s first memory comes back to him when they’re all in his basement at the start of spring. The others are playing D & D while El watches, because although she’s joined them once or twice, she finds it more entertaining to study how the others interact.

The blanket fort that’s been erected in the corner for a year and five months has garnered very few comments from the party, since everyone was instructed more or less not to try to force his recollection, but El has seen Mike glance at it a few times over the weeks he’s been recovering, wonder coloring his face.

On this day, he’s narrating in the middle of the game when he suddenly cuts himself off and swivels to stare at the fort. “I sat there.”

Everyone watches him blankly, slow to follow his gaze, but Will speaks first. “Yeah. Yeah, Mike, you did.”

“I sat there _a lot_ ,” Mike continues, staring at the fort like he’s waiting for its answers. More to himself than any of them, he murmurs, “I thought Holly built it.”

Dustin tries, “Do you remember anything else?”

Mike’s brows furrow, and with a speed she almost misses, El sees him jerk his eyes to her. She’s pretty sure nobody else even noticed. He scowls as he continues to study the fort.

When he notices the rest of the table watching him, he shakes his head slowly and turns back to face them. “I don’t think so.”

El’s chest hurts for the rest of the game.

—

It rains a lot in the spring. El spends most of her time sitting on the back porch of the cabin, staring out into the woods.

One time, Hopper joins her with two mugs of hot chocolate, and they look out into the distance together silently.

“Been awful quiet lately.”

El nods.

“And so have you.”

She looks at Hopper. The warm drink in her hand emits steam, fogging up her vision in a pleasant way, and she watches the sway of it as it evaporates into the air. “I’ve always been.”

Hopper rolls his eyes. “Not the way I remember it.”

El pauses. “How do you remember it?”

He hides his smile with a sip his hot chocolate, and the froth sticks to his mustache, dripping slightly into his cup before he pulls it away. El giggles. He looks affronted. “Oh, you think this is funny?”

El shakes her head through laughter, and he keeps scowling at her, the mug still hovering near his mouth.

“You need to laugh more. You may not know this, but laughter heals everything.”

El thinks she misheard. She leans toward him, ready for another lesson. “How?”

Hopper makes a show of leaning back in his chair and propping his feet on the porch railing, a thoughtful look on his face. “When you’re laughing - and I mean really laughing, stomach hurting, breathless stuff, you’re not thinking about anything except what you’re laughing about. And when you’re not thinking about what hurts, it doesn’t hurt.”

El thinks. “Can you laugh about what hurts?”

Hopper looks at her in surprise, eyebrows high on his forehead. “Sure, that’s probably ideal. Laugh at everything. Nothing is as important as you think. When you can laugh about something, that’s when you know it can’t hurt you anymore.”

El looks out into the woods again, deep in thought, and continues to drink. A bird caws overhead and they both look up, identical looks of wonder as they watch the outline of an eagle soar through the darkening sky.

Hopper hums. “He’ll remember you, eventually. You just gotta give it time.”

“Okay,” she says, although it seems more and more like Mike will never remember her again. Nobody has ever forgotten her before - nobody who really knew her. She hesitates to think it, and she knows blaming him is unforgivable, but she wonders sometimes if Mike forgot her so easily because she wasn’t important to begin with. After all, how can a mind lose something vital and still function? How can a person forget something that matters and still be whole?

“Hey,” Hopper says, dragging her hand away from where she’s using it to worry at her lip. “He will.”

She nods again. “Okay.”

—

Mike’s birthday comes around mid-April, and he decides to have a paintball fight in his backyard. Karen spends most of the day baking his cake and making snacks for everyone, and Hopper gets called in to the station, so El gets dropped off early to help him set up.

He’s hobbling around the yard, shoes squelching in shallow puddles left over from the showers earlier that week, and El watches him for a moment with a smile. He’s so lanky and so tall, it’s almost comical to see him attempt to navigate the world.

His broken arm is mostly healed, with the cast coming off sometime in May, and his shoulder hasn’t bothered him in weeks, but El grabs the paint pellets off him anyway, taking over the responsibility of stuffing them into the guns.

They sit in companionable silence on the lawn furniture, each working on their respective undertakings, and the sun shines brightly upon them, bronzing El’s skin as it simultaneously freckles Mike’s.

“How’s it living with Chief Hopper?” Mike asks at some point.

El sets down the gun she was holding. “It’s good.”

He doesn’t look up from wrapping string around a stick that he will shove into the dirt around the yard to set their boundaries. “Is he strict?”

El doesn’t know, since she has nothing to compare to. “He’s protective.”

Mike nods. “The guys were saying he won’t let you have a bike.”

El watches him. He doesn’t seem to be bothered by what he’s said, but she knows how frustrated he gets by reminders of his accident, so it’s surprising that he’s brought it up himself. Sometimes he reaches the cusp of remembering something, and then it escapes him, and it ruins his mood for the entire day. “No bike,” she confirms quietly.

They stay silent for another short while, this time a bit less comfortably, until he asks, “El, were we very close? Before?”

He’s looking at her now, eyes wide and open, trusting. Sometimes he asks her things about the past with a very fervent urgency, like she’s the only one he thinks will be truthful with him. “Pretty close.”

“Were we … dating?” There’s a bright red flush to his face, even despite the heat of the sun.

El scrunches her face, which makes him laugh, and that makes her laugh, too. When they quiet down, she shakes her head. “You never said.”

He’s watching her now, studious. He’s remarked a time or two that she emotes very little, and it seems to puzzle him exceedingly, making him stare at her more than anyone else does when she speaks.

“Well, what did _you_ say?”

El shifts uncomfortably. It’s a wholly baffling phenomenon, to have Mike question the things she’d simply taken for granted. He behaves sometimes as though El has - or ever had - the sort of autonomy that other people have. As though she could make final calls and navigate her relationships with awareness, when in reality the old Mike had been her eyes and ears and mouth. Looking back at it now, even with the knowledge that her autonomy matters, she still thinks she trusted him more than she will ever trust herself.

“Michael, come help me with this platter,” comes Karen’s shout through the screen door to the kitchen, and he sighs heavily. As he stands, his foot slips on the leg of his chair, and El watches almost in slow motion as he begins to drop straight down, a startled grunt leaving his lungs.

Before she even realizes she’s doing it, she’s got her hand out in front of her, halting his fall and propping him back up, suspended there for a frozen second. Once he realizes what’s happened, he huffs, so she gently releases her hold on him and lowers her hand. He stares at his feet for a long second, mouth open, and she feels a trickle of blood on her lip, swiping at it quickly.

Finally, he turns round eyes on her just as Karen shouts again. She stares back, challenging, and waits for him to ask the question he probably thinks will make him sound insane. He itches his knee right above the cast and shakes his head like he’s trying to rouse himself. Another second ticks by, and finally he grabs his crutches and limps away, leaving El wondering if it’s stupid of her to be so afraid.

He’d accepted her powers the first time around, but he was a different person then. Coming from a place where he’s already missing so many pieces of his life and feeling left behind by the world, he might not think she’s so cool now. 

The thud of his crutches stops at the screen door and he glances back at her again, but she keeps her focus studiously on the paintball gun she’s loading, so he disappears into the house.

—

“Is El short for anything? Or is it just - Elle?” Nate asks her one Sunday, hands digging through his pockets for quarters.

El pulls one out of her jacket and hands it to him. “Just El.”

Isabel slaps it out of his hand and sticks it in the coin slot of the Ms. Pac-Man machine, starting the game as she says, “You should tell people it’s short for something. Come up with the weirdest thing.”

Lucas snorts from where he’s standing next to Max. “Like ‘Eleven.’”

El shoots him a smirk. When Mike looks between them questioningly, Lucas glances away innocently, and El is saved from explaining by Nate’s snorting laugh. “That’s kind of hilarious. You should definitely use Eleven.”

El nods seriously. 

Isabel doesn’t look away from the screen as she calls, “And if they don’t believe you, just be, like, ‘folks, you can’t make this stuff up!’”

Lucas starts laughing so hard he’s wiping tears from his eyes, and Mike looks frustrated by the whole thing. “It’s not _that_ funny.”

An eye roll away from telling Mike off for his recent plague of bad attitudes, Lucas chooses instead to snap, “Yeah, not when it’s your _girlfriend_.”

Mike freezes, accusatorially glaring at his friend and blushing slightly.

Max emits a loud gasp as she sees Dustin slam the machine he’s sharing with Will when Will beats him, and she drops a quick kiss on Lucas’s cheek before bounding off to defend her own honor on the Frogger.

Will then approaches them and challenges Nate to a couple rounds of whack-a-mole at the front, and eventually El is left with Mike and Lucas, watching Isabel curse and shout at her screen.

“Is anyone as sick of this arcade as I am?” Mike whispers out the side of his mouth.

El smiles, eyes still glued to Isabel’s screen. She hears Lucas mutter, “A little.”

“Do you want to leave? We could go get milkshakes down the street or something, I can just say my leg hurts.”

Glancing at Dustin, who’s heavily engaged in an arm wrestling match with some boy he met a few minutes ago, El pauses. “But - friends don’t lie.”

Mike blinks and looks skeptical. “Who told you _that_?”

“Y -” El considers. “You did.”

There’s a heavy silence blanketing the three of them, Mike looking at her both like she’s grown another head and like he’s genuinely trying to remember the words. His eyes hover on her mouth before jerking back to her eyes, and back again. El lets her own gaze trace his face, dropping to the lips she’d kissed once, twice, what feels like years ago. Some days Mike looks at her like he knows this, like he meant them then and he still means them now, and those days are the hardest.

Isabel shrieks as a ghost catches her, dragging them both out of their stupor, and El turns to face their friend, hands down by her sides, feeling like she’s been caught doing something wrong.

Mike’s still staring at her, she can see it out of the corner of her eye, but something hot crawls over her skin and stops her from glancing back. She misses when Mike kissed her.

—

Max, Lucas, and Dustin love going back to the trailer they’d waited out the demogorgons in with Steve.

They frequently walk to it along the train tracks as the spring turns warmer, and sometimes full weekends are spent just cleaning the thing up and turning it into a place they can hang out. Between “wouldn’t it be cool? I mean, we were _badasses_ there” and “it’s our legacy,” El gathers that the mobile home has sentimental value, despite its ugliness and decrepit state, and eventually Hopper gives her permission to go there with them during daylight.

Mike has begun to come along as he’s gained mobility, and he’s carrying a big box of blankets everyone donated from their homes as they trod over the tracks on a hot May afternoon. There are small stones underfoot creating a muted racket as their feet step on them, but there’s an otherwise companionable silence as they all lug loads of decorations for the trailer and breathe heavily.

A loud, obnoxious gasp makes them all jump.

“Dustin, quit _doing_ that,” Lucas snaps, hefting his bag of cleaning rags and sprays higher.

“No, but look,” Dustin exclaims, pointing to the ground around them, “someone dropped a bunch of quarters. I could beat _everyone_ at _every_ game in The Palace with this much money.”

Max’s interest is piqued, so she sets her box down on the grass and begins collecting them gingerly. It takes long enough that everyone joins her, with El grabbing the shiny coins closest to her while she keeps her hold on the big pitcher of pineapple juice that had been delegated to her.

A thrum becomes audible, and El watches the pebbles by her shoes jump into the air and quiver.

After a minute, there’s a shout behind her, and she looks up to see that everyone else has ambled higher up into the weeds and away from the tracks, with Mike standing closest to her. His feet are placed strategically so that he won’t have to move his knee as he gathers the quarters, but he’s pivoted so far around that his body looks like a ribbon, with his wide eyes looking at her in horror.

Another shout, and she hears, “El, move!” from Will, but it’s too quick, and there’s a loud roar now and a whistle of some kind, all sounds she’s never heard before. Her pulse jumps and she tries to gauge what is happening, and everyone starts shouting at her and waving their arms.

She glances down at her feet, which are between two of the metal rails, but there’s no more quarters there. She isn’t sure what they want her to do.

Suddenly, Mike’s arm darts out toward her and grips the loose material of her jacket, jerking her roughly over one rail and into his body.

They slam into the ground together, Mike cushioning her fall, just as something huge whizzes by and blows wind over them. El skirt flutters up a little and she bends at the waist to stare at the large black machine as it continues on, without end, separating her and Mike from the others.

As suddenly as it appeared, it’s gone, and four sets of footsteps clamber toward them. El pushes herself up, crawling to her knees and staring at the broken glass of the pitcher she’d dropped on her way down. Mike groans as her weight lifts and grabs at the back of his head, sitting up very slowly. He rubs a hand gently over his knee, which stretches out to the side, and El waits to see if he’s injured.

He casts a dark look in her direction and shakes his head disbelievingly, one palm still pressed to the back of his head.

“Oh, my God, are you guys okay?” Will is crouching beside them with one hand on Mike’s shoulder.

El nods but doesn’t trust herself to speak, just pointing to the ruined pitcher and the large stain of the pineapple juice around it.

“That’s really okay,” Dustin intones, kicking the glass shards gently away from where the group is huddled. “My mom has, like, ten of these.”

“Did you hit your head?” 

Mike looks at Lucas with his face in a grimace and nods slightly, hand finally pulling away from his scalp so he can glance at it, and then immediately pressing back again.

“I’m sorry,” El says so quietly that she almost whispers. Nobody glances at her. She crawls forward and raises herself to her knees, lifting her hands to Mike so she can help him stand.

He ducks his head, making his hair fall into his face so she can’t see him, and begins to stand on his own. He limps ahead of the group, little enough that El can tell he’s trying not to, and Max rubs a supportive hand on El’s arm.

“What was that?” El asks quietly, out of earshot of everyone else.

“A train. They go very fast and they go on these rails, and if you get hit by it, you’re pretty much dead.”

El considers the rusted metal differently, assessing how little it portended to her of its danger. “We didn’t see it before, when I came.”

Max nods, “It’s pretty rare to run into them, unless you live on the tracks. You couldn’t have known. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

El doesn’t know what that means, but she guesses Max is telling her that the pitcher and Mike’s head and Mike’s limp aren’t her fault. But why is Mike acting like they are?

—

The twins invite everyone to the movies on their birthday, for a viewing of The Breakfast Club during the dinnertime showing. Everyone sneaks snacks in with them, but Lucas and Dustin manage to hide half a pizza each in their sweaters, very conspicuously standing near the concessions and looking at the ceiling.

There’s many other people El’s age gathered there, all friends of the apparently popular siblings, and El feels overwhelmed in a way she hasn’t since she met her sister the previous fall. Eventually, Nate links arms with her and starts to lead the crowd through the corridors. 

When they reach the theater, it’s empty, and the twenty of them spread out to their preferred seats. El glances at Mike by habit, willing to follow him wherever he goes, but she’s not prepared to see him peering back at her, something hostile and unimpressed coloring his normally soft features.

She looks away, spotting the rest of her friends skipping steps to run to the back, where Max and Lucas fight over the center seat and their laughter echoes through the room. El purses her lips and follows them slowly, studying the dirty carpet and the stained seats with a detached sort of interest.

“El, over here!”

She glances up to see Nate waving her over, sitting with Will and two other boys she doesn’t recognize. Walking over, she waves shyly to her friends in apology and sees Max nod at her with encouragement. 

El gets seated between Nate and a boy named Jeremy, who both narrate the movie with their opinions about the actors and the plot from start to finish. By the time the credits roll, El is crying from laughter and watching Will smother his giggles with his sleeve one seat away, and the happiness lasts her back to the lobby.

Mike and Dustin stand near the doors, loudly debating the relative merits of hiring more established actors for lead roles and hiring unknowns, with Max interjecting a few times despite Lucas grabbing her hand to halt her.

After a brief friendly wrestle with Will, Nate swings one friendly arm over each of El’s and Will’s shoulders before saying his goodbyes to everyone and walking out with Isabel. 

As the core party begins to walk out together, Lucas suggests some D & D, but Mike throws a glance El’s way and frowns, shaking his head. “I’m kind of beat.”

Unwittingly, everyone’s eyes drop to his knee. The cast on his leg has been replaced with a brace, but it aches and twinges sometimes, making him cranky and lethargic.

“It’s not my leg, I just,” he gestures a little, flustered. “I’ve been getting vertigo, and it wears me out.”

Sympathetic, the party agrees to meet another time. Nobody can comprehend the things Mike has gone through for the previous five months, but El can understand his anguish.

The psychological effects of Mike’s injury get forgotten amidst the physical symptoms, but El knows more than anyone that a nosebleed or a head-splitting migraine is easier to deal with than the rage and the self-pity that comes and goes in waves despite the genuine belief that you’re healing. Catching his weary glance at his knee, she realizes his injury is in fact at least part of the problem, which means he'd lied. She stays quiet.

—

One night, when the whole party is having dinner together, El asks Joyce if she can have Eggos instead of the meatloaf. Joyce runs a gentle hand over El's hair and nods, smiling sweetly. "Of course, sweetheart."

Mike's staring at El when Joyce heads to the kitchen. "Why would you eat waffles for dinner?"

The boys give him looks, but El shrugs simply. She just wants to, so she will. Maybe that isn't a confidence she would have held several months ago. Maybe having to constantly explain herself to the person who used to perfectly understand her has given her a thicker skin.

Will starts, "Mike, come on ..."

"Okay, so El always ate waffles for dinner during the missing year?" Mike sighs. "Anything else I'm missing?"

Dustin shakes his head. "You don't have to be so -"

"No!" Mike says sharply, setting his fork down. "No, and stop treating me like I'm some kind of villain. So what, that we went to the Snow Ball together? So what, does that mean I know her? Does that mean I owe her something? All of you keep saying all this stuff, like it should change what I think and what I feel, but it _wasn't me_! That _wasn't_ me, and _this_ is. _I'm_ Mike, I'm not some crazy, evil replacement who can't do anything right, I'm _Mike_ , I'm your friend. So can all of you stop waiting for the other shoe to drop, because _I don't know Eleven._ " He stands from the table and pivots, pushing his chair in with manners that are coming second-hand to his tirade.  "And for the record, just because I was run over by a car, instead of stolen by the government or kidnapped by some evil monster, doesn't mean that  _I can't change, too._ "

The silence left behind by Mike when he slams out of the room is frigid.

El thinks, if he hadn’t changed so profoundly with his TBI, it would be harder to accept being forgotten. In her darkest moments, moments she feels weak, she is grateful that she lost him both in the past and in the present all at once; having him remember her and still slowly grow to hate her, as he seems to have done, would be unbearable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think my most important message here is: let your loved ones grow and change and wisen as they need. Don't vilify and don't try to make them one-dimensional. We are all struggling.
> 
> Mike and Eleven are very good people who are going through a very bad time.
> 
> MILEVEN FOREVER <3


	3. the sky of the sky of a tree called life

In June, Max and Lucas officially ‘go steady.’

There’s no explanation Max can give for the status or the phrase that doesn’t awaken more questions in El, but the idea seems to be that they spend more time together than any of the rest of the party, usually alone, and they kiss a lot. El thinks she and Mike might have gone steady if January had never happened.

She accidentally walks in on Max and Lucas in private conversations a few times, since she regularly spends a lot of time at Max’s house, and they always jump apart as though scalded, even though they hadn’t even been touching.

From that, El gathers that there can be intimate conversations and possibly even intimate silences that people who go steady don’t want others to see. Max always turns bright red, which makes Lucas laugh at her, and then they end up smiling cheerfully at El and welcoming her in as the ‘third wheel.’

She remembers once, after the Snow Ball, she and Mike sat on a bench outside of the school and didn’t talk. They were waiting for their rides to pull up in the parking lot, and the clamor of other kids made for nice background noise as they cooled off from the hot air of the gymnasium. The night air was very cold and she was very tired, so she’d leaned her head on Mike’s shoulder and closed her eyes, listening to him breathe and feeling the motion of it lift her up and down, up and down rhythmically. That silence had been intimate, she guesses. That silence had been nice.

—

Hop doesn’t let El bike at all, and especially not alone, but he seems to approve of her sitting on the back of somebody’s bike as long as she’s traveling within a horde.

Thus, every so often, as the summer makes the days grow longer, El hops on the back of Dustin’s bike and the six of them all traverse the town with Max closing up their pack on her skateboard.

Most of the time, it’s warm and the wind blowing through her now lengthy and well-groomed hair makes El euphoric. She’s speeding through empty streets, free to do whatever she wants, free to come and free to go, free to whoop and holler with the others if she wants, free to stay quiet.

One Wednesday afternoon, they are all flying through town to catch a matinee showing of The Goonies when a loud horn deafens them from behind. El doesn’t react quite as fitfully as the others, but her eyes are drawn, almost like a magnet, straight ahead to where Mike’s bike is veering. He’s gaping over his hunched shoulder at the speeding car even as his own wheels leave course, and his face isn’t like anything she’s ever seen before. Flickeringly, she wonders if that’s how he looked the night he got hit.

As she watches, his front tire catches on the curb and flips the whole bike sideways, vaulting Mike up into the air and hurling his body toward a tree.

Her hand is out and she’s shifting his motion straight up, pulling him up into the sky above nearly any building in their vicinity. From so far away, he looks small, floating on his back and moving his limbs around a bit as though he’s swimming. El barely notices when Dustin brakes.

With care, she begins to lower Mike back to the ground, gently and close to the grass so there’s cushion if he falls. After a minute, he drops to his feet and looks straight at her, eyes glued to the blood freely flowing from her nose. Nobody speaks.

When he finally looks away, he begins to dust himself off, even though he hadn’t actually fallen.

The car is long gone, beeping past them when nobody was even watching, and the street is quiet as all of them gather their bearings.

“You okay?” Max offers first, hands wrapped around Lucas’s shoulders and face hidden behind his back.

Mike nods brusquely and walks to his bike, inspecting it for damage.

“That was so cool, El,” Will gushes breathlessly. His bike is forgotten a few feet away from him, and he’s standing dumbfounded by the side of the road, staring up into the sky where Mike had been. “I can’t believe you can do that.”

Mike lifts his bike and straddles it again. “You didn’t need to do that,” he grumbles, quiet enough that he probably thinks nobody will hear.

Max rolls her eyes. “Way to be grateful for not getting slammed face-first into a tree. You’d be a lot less pretty now if she hadn’t helped.”

There’s a terse silence as everyone looks at Mike’s turned back. His hands are on the handlebars of his bike and the lines of his shoulders are hard, but he seems to sort out his inner turmoil and chances a glance back at El. “Nobody told me you had telekinesis.”

She gives a tight smile and shrugs, eyes glued to Dustin’s jacket now.

“That’s cool,” Mike finally manages. “That’s really cool, El.”

He limps a little for the rest of the day, as though the fear of getting hit again reopened all of his closing wounds, but nobody except El seems to notice. She catches him give her considering looks a few times, but he doesn’t bring up what happened again. 

—

El enters her mental void every night, almost compulsively.

With a blindfold on her eyes and her legs crossed under her, she walks into that dark space and looks for Mike, without fail. And, without fail, he is never there.

Sometimes she thinks she hears echoes of voices disappearing just as she tunes in, but despite searching for what feels like miles of that empty vacuum, she never spots someone she knows.

Tonight, Hopper has signaled he will be late, and the clock shows it is past one-zero-three-zero, so El huddles on her bed and rolls the television so close that she is nearly plastered against it.

The hum of the static ebbs slowly from her conscience as she steps into the void, but it takes nearly a minute for her to hear the voices. They echo in all directions with seemingly no source, and she has trouble tracking them.

Eventually, she stumbles upon Mike in a chair, several feet away from Lucas on a bed, several feet away from Dustin on the ground. She thinks that’s all until Will’s tinny voice filters through, and she sees him on a couch a little ways away behind Mike. They are all holding their radios, and El walks into the center of where they are clustered, looking at each of her boys in turn, trying to be seen.

“… all I’m saying is, if she’d look at me even once, maybe we could go ahead and start having a sordid love affair,” Dustin whines, picking at the thigh of his jeans. “She doesn’t give me the time of day, and we were  _lab partners_.”

“Can you quit moaning about this girl already,” Lucas rolls his eyes. “We don’t even talk about Mike’s campaigns this much.”

“Oh, about that,” Mike steps in, “I don’t think I’ll be ready by Friday, guys, sorry. I honestly can’t focus lately.”

Will answers quickly, “That’s okay, Mike. Your campaigns were always amazing, but sometimes it takes time to get that creative.”

“Plus,” Dustin says with a lilt. “It opens up more time to talk about Lauren -“

Loud groans from the other three cut him off, and he pouts at his intercom. El giggles. Nobody hears.

“Maybe Max can talk to her,” Will offers. “Max is good at talking to girls.”

Mike scoffs. “What, because she is also a girl?”

Lucas says, “Or maybe because she somehow manages to talk to your spiteful self and also make El smile a lot.”

Mike purses his mouth. “El doesn’t ever smile a lot.”

“Why are you so mad at her, anyway?” Most of the sentence is distorted as Dustin says it through a spoonful of cereal.

“I’m not ‘mad’ at her,” Mike responds. “I just don’t get it.” He looks frustrated, a frown crinkling his brow as he picks at his nails.

“What’s to get? You were in love with her for a year, and now somehow everything she does - all of which you adored in a really gross way, by the way - makes you snap at her and then bitch to us.”

“I don’t  _bitch_ ,” Mike whines back immediately. “I  _observe_.”

“Help us to understand, buddy,” Dustin says, cramming another spoon in his mouth as suddenly a television appears next to him and he clicks it on. The static is quiet, barely even noticeable to El, but she thinks the boys might not hear it at all.

“Yeah,” Will finally joins in. “El is our friend, but she’s your friend, too. Or she’s always trying to be.”

Mike stands from his chair agitatedly and paces in a circle. “ _I don’t know her._ Why is that so hard for you people to understand?”

“You didn’t know her in 1983, either, but you were drooling even though you thought she was deaf and mute. It can’t be that,” Dustin says absently, eyes glued to the TV.

“Has it occurred to anyone that people can change? Maybe I already hated her right before the accident. Maybe she’s different now. Maybe I’m not somebody who likes her anymore.”

Will looks down sadly. “That’s … really depressing to hear, Mike.”

“And what kind of girlfriend is she, anyway,” Mike continues, on a roll, “if she barely comes to see me, and, like, a  _month_  after my accident she’s hanging off Nate all the time, and she doesn’t even understand me when we talk? It’s like we speak two different languages.”

El stands between the four boys, frozen, watching Mike. He’s stopped pacing and leans against a wall now that fades out into the darkness. El tries to identify which part of the house he’s in, but to no avail. He has his back against the faded brown wallpaper and one hand in the pocket of his pants, staring at his toes. He wiggles them within his socks, and El’s mesmerized, watching their motion.

Lucas rolls his eyes. “Well, you could have just said that. Mike, you’re allowed to be jealous.”

“I’m not jealous,” Mike shouts, then seems to realize how loud he was as he glances around him. His skin colors. “I just think that whatever we had before isn’t what you guys think. It couldn’t have been that  _amazing_. She doesn’t even talk to me. She likes Nate now.”

Amazing. El isn’t sure that it was ever amazing anymore, either. Maybe it was just easy somehow, in a way it can no longer be.

Dustin finishes chewing and says, “Mike, you’re an idiot.”

Lucas hums in agreement. “She probably doesn’t talk to you because you’re, like, really hard to talk to now.”

Will inserts, “And nobody’s blaming you for that, Mike. You have no control over what happened to you, and nobody’s saying that. You’ve changed a lot, but it’s not a bad thing. And I think the problem is both of you don’t understand how much this whole thing is going to affect your lives. I mean, you can’t be who you were before the accident, and that has to be okay with you.”

There’s a long silence as everyone but Mike continues to multitask with something, but Mike just continues to stare at his feet. 

Eventually, he says, “Every time she sees me, she makes me feel like I’m letting her down. She keeps looking at me like she expects more and I keep disappointing her.”

Dustin begins chewing another mouthful and rumbles, “Believe me, you’ve disappointed me since the day we met.”

“But, I mean, she’s probably disappointed old-you, too.” Lucas shrugs. There’s an inaudible shout, and Lucas bellows, “In a minute!” to someone El can’t see. Then, he continues, “I think you’ve both been equally dumb and equally pathetic ever since the accident, if I’m being honest. But Eleven is different - “

“She’s not like us, Mike -“

“She, one hundred percent, had a fucked up life -“

“Yeah, and you gotta be understanding about how much trouble she has with a lot of ordinary stuff. You’re finally in the same boat with her. It’s kind of cute, actually.”

“Shut up,” Mike whispers hoarsely, and El wants to touch him. “I wish I remembered more.”

“But you don’t. And maybe you will, maybe you won’t; you can’t control that. Look, I gotta go deal with my sister, but just chill out, okay? El still loves you and you still love El. You just both forgot.” As Lucas clicks out of the intercom, he disappears into thin air; El runs a hand through where he was just standing, but there’s nothing left behind.

Dustin and Lucas say more encouragements and also power off their radios, and after a minute El is standing next to Mike alone. He’s still gripping his intercom, knuckles white. There’s a tremor in his bad leg, and it makes her heart pound, because he’s powering through it even when nobody can see him. Mike has always wanted to be more, to be stronger, to be better, and the idea that he might feel belittled by something that happened to him feels unjust. He wasn’t responsible for what the drunk driver did, but he was going to live with the consequences for the rest of his life.

She watches him gaze into empty space for a long time, studying him in a way she can’t anymore, not with the way they are around one another.

Before she realizes he’s about to speak, he calls out, “Eleven?”

She startles and walks toward him. “Mike?”

He doesn’t react to her voice at all, staring at the floor. Another second, another time. “El?”

“Mike?” She steps even closer, nose almost touching his shoulder. “Mike?”

He doesn’t see her. With a sigh, he tosses his intercom out of sight and flickers out, leaving El standing in the void alone.

—

There’s a small creamery near the photography store where Jonathan works during the summer, and Max had her first meal there when her family drove into Hawkins. She drags everyone there on a hot day, the humidity making their shirts stick to their skin and their hair plaster to their faces.

The sundae El orders is too large for her, but nobody wants to split the flavor. As the only one who’s never tried Neapolitan, she’s the only one to order it with any hope of enjoying it, so everyone shoots hesitant looks at her glass until Mike takes a deep breath and gestures for her to hand it over.

They pass it back and forth like that in silence for some time while listening to the others speak. Seated next to each other, they’re both deliberately avoiding one another’s touch. El uses her left hand to scoop out the melting dessert while using her right arm to hold onto the tabletop rigidly, and she can see Mike on her right doing more of the same.

“And he basically doesn’t even talk to me at home anymore,” Max says, slurping at her milkshake. Lucas stares at her, studying the silly straw in her mouth with equal parts disgust and fascination. “He’s just always lifting weights or blasting dumb music from his room.”

“That’s good, right?” Dustin asks. “He’s, like, a total tool.”

Max nods and keeps her eyes on her glass. “Yeah, but … he’s my brother. I just hate it. I hate this.” She grabs her straw and swirls the contents of her drink with it, movements jerky like she’s trying to stab it. “I mean, I see Will and his brother, and Mike and his sister, and it’s, like, does he really hate me so much that we can’t even be civil?”

“Maybe it’s a brother-sister thing,” Mike offers, making a face as he spoons more of the Neapolitan into his mouth. “I mean, Nancy and I hated each other until a couple years ago, and even now we don’t talk much. Although, she said we did get close before the …” Before the silence can get too empathetic and awkward, he continues, “Maybe it’s just harder when you’re not already related by blood and forced to tolerate each other?”

Mike’s knee gently bumps into El’s thigh, probably unnoticed by him. They’re both in shorts, so her skin pebbles at the close contact, but she doesn’t look down for a few seconds, scared that it’ll make him jolt away.

Max shrugs. “Maybe.” She slurps some more, and Lucas’s expression turns more affectionate as she reaches the dregs of her beverage, making the sounds louder. “I mean, I hate him, too. I don’t want to braid each other’s mullets or anything. But my mom gets so upset, and then his dad gets really … he gets very …” she thinks better of whatever she planned to say and shakes her head. “Whatever. Maybe we’ll be able to speak to each other once we’re both moved out and miles apart.”

El finally glances at her thigh and notes with surprise that Mike’s gazing at her, mirth warm in his eyes.

“Okay, but, like, please don’t,” Lucas pleads jokingly. “He will definitely kill me when he’s not living at home anymore.”

Max reaches across the table and grasps his hand, a bright smile beaming at him. “I’ll kill him first.”

—

“Hey, kid,” Hopper says from her doorway, holding a large box, haphazardly wrapped in newspapers and brown tape. “Come help me open this.”

El follows him to the couch, the material of her jeans swishing with each step, and she realizes the usual cacophony of the cabin is gone now - he’s turned off the TV and closed the windows.

They sit on the floor, and El tears into the wrapping at one end, pulling it back to reveal a transparent box filled with school supplies. There’s even a backpack on the bottom in pink, her favorite color, and she opens the container with awe, rifling through its contents.

“Why?” she asks as her eyes jump around at the items now littering the living room floor.

“I’ve enrolled you in Hawkins High,” Hopper drawls proudly. “You’re starting there in the fall.”

El pulls out a shiny notebook, little drawings of stars and hearts sprinkled on the cover and covered in glitter. 

“Your friends, uh,” Hopper continues, “they gave you this as a gift.”

El’s touch on the stationery turns reverent. “Gift?”

Hopper watches her look through the rest of the box silently, answering her questions when she finds an item she doesn’t recognize, but mostly just leaving her to it. The feeling in her chest is new; she never got a present before whose purpose wasn’t survival.

As she puts the last of the gifts back in the box, which Hopper informs her is the perfect height to fit in her closet under her coats, he clears his throat. “You won’t believe it, but, uh, it was that Wheeler kid’s idea.”

El freezes. “Mike?”

He rolls his eyes. “That’s the one.”

El’s hands smooth down the sides of the box, halting at the very edge, fingers tightly wound around the rim. “Mike.”

Hopper grips the torn newspaper between his pointer and middle finger and jiggles it, drawing her attention to the bright pink bow that had been attached to it. “He even wrapped the thing.” He gives the crinkled newspaper a once-over. “Badly.”

El smiles. “He asked me what color I like best at D & D once. Pink.”  _For the color of the first thing he ever gave her, a dress she wore for months after she lost him,_  she doesn’t say. The box sits in the middle of her bedroom for a whole week, and she plays with its contents every chance she gets.

It’s not until much later that she realizes she’d told Mike about pink before the accident.

—

Holly loves El.

Somehow, El has managed to personify the three things Holly thinks girlhood is all about: pretty dresses, shiny hair, and quietude. When El tags along to the Wheeler house, she can hardly get a minute to herself, for the little blonde tail that attaches to her. What’s surprising is how much more Holly adores Mike.

Since the conversation El overheard in the void, Mike has been a lot less avoidant of El’s presence, even if not much more engaging on the whole, so it’s with little surprise that El finds herself sitting on the lawn with him as they watch Holly somersault over the fresh-smelling grass and the sun sets overhead.

Dustin and Max are arm wrestling for the seventh round on the deck table, their loud grunts and snarls wafting through the cooling air.

At one point, El stands to use the bathroom and hears Holly ask Mike to swing her around like he used to do when she was “more little.”

Karen hears this, somehow, and her sharp shout comes from the screen door a second later, “Holly, leave your brother alone.”

“But I wanna swing around!”

El stands by the door squinting at the sight; Mike stumbles up to his feet, still unstable on his bad leg, and reaches to grasp Holly by the waist.

“Michael, put her  _down_!”

Mike sighs loudly and rolls his eyes. “Mom, it’s fine. I’ve swung her a million times.”

“Not with two broken limbs and a head injury. Michael!”

By now, Dustin and Max have swiveled around to watch, and if El looks closely she can see a blush on Mike’s face and a look of obtuse determination. He’s trying to prove something to himself, and maybe to the rest of them, too.

As she steps over the threshold into the house, she sees him lift Holly up above his head and turn around in circles, jerking her through the air like she doesn’t weigh anything. Holly is squealing joyfully when the door shuts.

She thinks she hears shouts when she’s in the bathroom, but they’re soft. It isn’t until she’s back in the hall that she hears Holly crying and Dustin and Max speaking in mollifying voices to Karen. One glance out into the yard shows her that Mike isn’t there, and she strides through the house looking for him. The place is empty save for her, eerie in the way she remembers it being that first day in 1983, when Mike had saved her.

A sniffle from Nancy’s room has her knocking on the door softly, but she gets no response. As she steps in, her eyes land on Mike leaning half-bent against a wall in the distant corner. He’s taking deep sobbing breaths and clutching his chest, the back of one hand scrubbing over his eyes, and his body begins sliding slowly down the wall until he’s crumpled on the floor, almost hidden from her view by Nancy’s bed.

El steps further in and shuts the door behind her silently with a flick of her head.

His face is shining with tears now, and as she walks closer El spots him clutching his thigh above the brace, face contorted in pain.

“Mike?”

He startles, going silent and gazing at her through swollen wet eyes, red skin rimmed with dark eyelashes. Through a clogged voice, he asks, “What are you doing here?”

Coming forward and lowering herself in front of him, El asks softly, “What happened?”

Mike scrubs a hand over his face again, removing all traces of his tears as he tries to focus on her question. The white of his knuckles around his brace tells El he’s hurting a lot. He scoffs a little, shaking his head, and mumbles, “I was stupid. I thought I could do what I used t - stupid, I was stupid.”

“Did you hurt yourself?” Mike shrugs, but his hands don’t unclench from around his leg. El grasps the fingers on each of his hands one by one, gently twining them between hers, and shuffles closer. “You don’t have anything to prove to anyone.”

He rolls his eyes, but it seems aimed more at himself, at the universe, than at her words. His gaze keeps swinging to their joined hands.

They sit like that for what feels like minutes, could be hours. The sounds of Karen’s yelling eventually quiet entirely. A creak down the hall alerts them that Holly is back in her room, and moments later she is giggling joyfully again, which in turn makes Mike exhale deeply in relief.

“This is so much easier,” Mike murmurs some moments later, his fingers clenching slightly around hers.

El looks at their hands. “What?”

“Just,” Mike rolls his head to gesture at the room, “when it’s just us. There’s so much pressure to live up to whatever people remember about me, and me and you, when everyone is watching. I think that psychs me out. But that’s stupid, too.”

El stares at their hands and doesn’t respond. Holly’s giggles are filtered by the door, breaking through the comical sounds of Dustin’s purrs, which makes Mike snort. El glances around Nancy’s room, which is colored in soft hues of pink and covered in frills that make El want to bury herself in them. The sun has mostly set outside the windows, leaving the sky a dark violet-green between the curtains.

“You remember things,” El says, very little of her tone belying a question, but Mike hasn’t openly talked about the memories he’d gained back. 

He nods absently, eyes still glued to the tangle of their skin between them, creamy yellows and pinks weaving into a melange of something soft. El feels warm for the first time in six months. “Bits of things.”

“What things?” El asks.

“Um,” Mike frowns. “Will’s body being dug out of the water. You saving me from the cliff. The Police’s stupid song.”

El doesn’t know why the police wrote a song, but she knows he’s talking about the Snow Ball. She blushes. “It’s a good song.”

Mike lets his eyes trail up slowly, crawling from her hands, over her arms, and finally up to her eyes, a soft smile on his face. “The best.”

—

Will becomes very close with Nate and Isabel that summer, and once he shoots up in height to being nearly as tall as Mike, he becomes a completely changed boy from the one El saw lying in bed and suffering from the Shadow Monster’s possession. 

He invites El along with the three of them a lot, trying to help her connect with her future classmates, and Joyce enjoys hosting small parties at their house where she can keep Will in her sight, so El spends many days huddled on the worn couch of the Byers’ living room, playing card games and Truth or Dare.

Joyce usually joins them during movie nights and wraps El in her arms, pressed up against Joyce’s side as they eventually tumble into a deep doze before the credits roll. 

One night, she wakes up when it’s quiet and dark. The television is showing the end screen of the VHS and making a muffled noise, and Joyce’s chest is rising and falling with even breaths beneath El’s head. She lies quietly and blinks into the darkness as she tries to figure out what woke her.

A soft noise makes her lift her head a bit to hear better. Isabel is wheezing softly on the other end of the couch, El’s feet piled on her lap and her own head hanging over the armrest.

As El squints around the room to find the girl’s brother, she sees a dark shape on the floor behind the coffee table, moving. After studying it for a long minute, she realizes it’s Will and Nate tangled together, kissing wetly. Soft smacking noises reach her through the quiet room, and she digs her face into Joyce’s shirt, blushing both on behalf of the boys and herself.

If Mike knew about this, he’d be kicking himself, she thinks to herself through a silent giggle. That’s the thought that lulls her back to sleep.

—

The process of criminally charging the teenager who hit Mike forces Mike to be at the police station frequently. As the court date approaches, Mike gives several depositions and interviews, and Hopper even convinces him to get a psych-eval. The higher the stack against the perp, he says, the lower the chance he hurts someone else ever again.

Hop takes a strong liking to Mike over the course of those weeks.

When El visits the station with him on days when she’s got nothing else to do, she sees Mike from the little glass window in Hop’s office door. Mike never sees her, but she likes knowing that they’re both in a safe place on those days – the safest they can be in Hawkins.

Once, she spots Hopper walking him out of one of the interrogation rooms after another deposition, and Mike looks tired in his bones. There are dark circles under his eyes and he looks bleak, yellowish tinge to his skin and crumpled posture. Hop’s got one heavy arm over Mike’s shoulders, pulling him against his side and keeping him upright as they walk. When they reach the bench by the door, he lowers Mike onto it slowly and ruffles a hand through his long hair before walking to grab him some water.

Mike doesn’t look much better after the water, but he curls his lip in gratitude. He lets out a deep sigh when Hopper drops down next to him and tips his head back against the wall, murmuring something to him.

El props herself up against the door, hands on the ledge of the window as she peers at the scene. Hop’s eyes keep jumping to her as he chats with Mike, a knowing look coloring them, but he doesn’t otherwise acknowledge her.

When Hop spots Ted’s car out front, he pats Mike’s knee in farewell, and El begins to withdraw from the door. But then Mike turns to throw out his water cup and looks straight at El through the little glass, a small shocked smile on his parted lips. He raises a hand slightly and waves at her, so she waves back.

He stands like that for a long second, hand still hovering in the air, and then Hopper pulls him out of his reverie with a clap on Mike’s shoulder. Mike turns and starts walking out of the station, but he throws another glance back at El and waves again.

—

The therapist Mike has been seeing from the day he was released from the hospital advises him to address his confusion and blurry memories with the people who care about him. Mike dealt with most of the complications of his accident alone, choosing to shoulder the difficulties instead of ask for help, but by the end of June even he understands that this method of overcoming isn’t working.

To the surprise of everyone but Hop, he enlists El’s help. In return, she asks him to teach her science.

They meet at the cabin under Hopper’s watchful eye and sit at her desk, mutually aided and mutually exposed.

“Are parallel universes moving in parallel?”

Mike shakes his head. “No, the science behind their location is still pretty muddy. But we wouldn’t be able to see them or anything. They’re just out there somewhere.”

El stares at him seriously, and he looks back earnestly, and they devolve into laughter at one another’s expressions and at the ridiculousness of the concept.

“But there’s a parallel universe somewhere out there, where I never got hit. And another one where I got hit fifty times.”

El feels herself turn somber. Mike’s tragedy wasn’t just his own, it was hers, too. The idea of someone she cares for so deeply being hurt many more times and in many more ways feels like a physical burn somewhere deep in her chest. 

“One where I never left the Lab?” she asks.

“And one where you never went at all,” he responds with a nod.

“One where you never forgot.”

Mike looks at her softly. “I’m kind of glad I forgot.”

She blinks back.

“I … I think I needed this to happen. Maybe - well, no, maybe I wouldn’t ask to get hit by a car again if I had a choice. I - no, I wouldn’t. But what happened, happened, and now I’m different. And you’re different, too. Everyone is.” She  _was_  different. All of them had lost Mike when he woke up without memories, but El had also lost herself: a version of herself who was small and vulnerable and needed her Mike. She doesn’t  _need_  Mike anymore, and that is both the worst and the best thing that happened.

A thought strikes her. “Do you  _want_  to remember?”

Mike is silent for a long time. “Some things, I do.” Hopper shuffles past the door with a long, suspicious look at them, and Mike clears his throat. “Like the time you made Troy pee his pants - that happened, right? For the longest time, I didn’t know about your powers, and I thought it was just a really good dream I had.”

He’s snickering as he looks back at the textbook they’ve been studying. He becomes immersed in reading the next passage and El lets herself study him. His hair was trimmed recently and lies in soft waves that shine in the light from the window. His skin looks soft, unmarred by the pubescent blemishes El’s own has been subjected to, and his eyelashes are fanning his cheeks gently. Her chest expands as she takes him in, something big forming inside her that feels like it will never fit.

She doesn’t need Mike anymore, no. But she knows now that she wants him, and she’s grateful that she got to learn the distinction.

—

Hopper asks El to pick her own birthday.

Records of her actual birth were smudged by the government, if not completely fabricated due to the nature of the project, and Hopper wants her to have the choice to celebrate her life on a day that makes her happy.

El picks August fourteenth.

It’s the fourteenth day of the month, and she’s going to turn fourteen in 1985, and she’s decided her fourteenth year will be her happiest one.

August fourteenth is the day Mike wakes up at dawn and bikes all the way to the cabin before the streetlights have even turned off. Hopper cracks open the front door and then heaves a put-upon sigh, yelling for El to “come get your damn boyfriend.” El lurches from her bed, her curls in disarray and pillowcase creases on her cheeks, blinking blearily as she stumbles through the still-dark house.

When she appears in the doorway, Mike is holding Rory the dinosaur with two hands, a lopsided grin on his face. As he takes in her appearance, she manages a small smile, her eyes drifting closed as she leans on the door.

“Hi,” he finally breathes. “You look pretty.”

El squints up at him quizzically, temple pressed to the wood she’s holding herself up by. He beams. “Good, I mean. You look pretty good.”

As the sky lights up behind Mike and simmering sunlight cradles them both in the cocoon of the doorway, El thinks it’s the brightest day in years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to heartily thank everyone who left comments and kudos. Your feedback has nourished me and motivated me so much; I am unbelievably happy that so many of you are able to connect with this story in all of your unique and beautiful ways. Thank you very much for reading!
> 
> Story and chapter titles taken from E. E. Cummings' "i carry your heart with me."


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